An analysis of regional solicitors' attitudes to, and the use of, mediation

Since the Woolf Report of 1996, which led to the wholesale reform of the civil justice system in the late 1990s, mediation has had an important role to play in the UK legal framework of dispute resolution.

The landscape of civil justice since the attendant legal aid reforms of the late 1990s and continuing into the early part of the millennium, as well as increased court fees have arguably had an adverse impact on access to justice through court-based solutions. This has in turn placed alternative dispute resolution and particularly mediation in the spotlight. Yet for the majority of civil legal disputes, mediation is still arguably under-used and undervalued as a process of dispute resolution.

This study develops the research undertaken into the views and attitudes to mediation of legal practitioners practising in Canterbury, Kent and addresses the associated questions regionally. The report begins with a literature review of important research in this field and then goes on to analyse the responses of a number of legal practitioners who were interviewed for this study from the wider Kent region, practising in both the family and commercial law sectors. The participant responses demonstrate legal practitioners’ views on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of mediation and of the use mediation as an alternative dispute resolution process. Although there were some differences, the findings broadly matched those of the study conducted locally in Canterbury. Overall, the findings of this study reveal that legal practitioners view mediation positively, although there were various concerns about the particular circumstances where mediation would be considered inappropriate.